


Speaking Up

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [116]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avenger Loki (Marvel), Avenger Reader (Marvel), Comfort, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Muteness, POV Loki (Marvel), Pre-Relationship, Protective Loki (Marvel), Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: The newest Avenger doesn’t have much to say in a crowd, but Loki can’t stop thinking about them.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [116]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 15
Kudos: 238





	Speaking Up

It seemed like you didn’t have a lot to say. Maybe that was what first caught his attention. He was used to people vying for the floor, fighting to say what they thought needed to be said and damn the consequences or what others might think of them for it. Before he came here to the Tower, he’d been one of those kinds of people. But maybe he’d settled a bit, over the short period of time that he’d been here. They never listened to him. They never acknowledged that he could have anything valuable to say. Rather than allowing himself to rage and fume at them for it, though, he started merely sitting back and watching their performances. Mortals. So fired up and angry about all the wrong things. So certain that their poorly-laid plans would lead to victory. So many times, he’d crossed his arms and looked down at his lap in hopes of hiding his smirk while they planned their failures.

And you did the same. Well, you didn’t sit there smirking, or, if you did, you were better at hiding it than any mortal had any right to be, but he could plainly see your other emotions on your face. More than once, you’d met his eyes across the table and made your own go wide at him, like you were asking what the hell the others were thinking. You never chimed in. At first, he remembered thinking that it was just a newbie’s shyness, that you were trying to get a feel for the dynamics of the team before you tried to rock the boat. 

But you didn’t say much outside of those kinds of conversations, either. At dinner, you sat there with everyone else and ate and listened and laughed, but you never added to the conversation. You trained with the others in the gym, and you accepted Romanoff’s brutal routines without a word, pushing yourself until he could see from a distance how your limbs trembled with exertion. Sometimes he happened upon you and Wanda sitting knee-to-knee on the couch, heads bent together as she talked to you, but you never answered her out loud. Instead, you wrote out your answers in a little notepad you carried with you. 

For a long time, that bothered him. It made him angry. You were clearly well-liked by the others. They protected you like something precious, instead of merely as a teammate. Barnes smiled at you, and often, and here and there he even _winked_ at you. Loki knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that they would be sure to listen to you, if you only spoke up, but you never did. 

He stumbled across the cure for his anger one night when you were returning from a mission. He heard Steve’s voice, raised in anger, as it often was when he spoke to Loki. Someone else had broken protocol, gone against his poorly-laid plans, and he was giving them a dressing-down for it. Unlike all the times that he’d yelled at Loki, however, there was something new and interesting in his voice. Beneath his loudness and anger, he sounded upset. Concerned. It was intriguing. Loki knew it would have been better to slink away and leave the two of them to it, but maybe some petty part of him wanted to know who else saw Rogers for what he was. 

It was you. 

The sight of it was almost enough to make him come out of hiding. Rogers was practically looming over you, his serum-enhanced muscles straining against the fabric of his suit. For a while, your chin was lifted defiantly at him even as you listened to him how badly you could have messed things up. And, from what Loki could hear, Rogers’s rage was centered entirely around _what could have been_. Neither of you looked any worse for the wear. At certain points during his tirade, he lowered his voice, he reached out to you, like he was trying to make you understand what he was really upset about. But Loki couldn’t see anything like understanding in your face.

Then things began to shift. He loomed a little larger over you, and Loki tried to ignore the way it put _him_ on edge. He reached out like he wanted to grab your shoulder this time, but then dropped his arm back to his side, and instead asked what you had to say for yourself. You reached for one of your pockets, and then he actually did grab your wrist to pull it away.

“Fuck the notepad,” he said, his voice burning with anger. “Just _tell_ me. Use your words. If you can’t trust your team enough to follow the plan or _speak_ to them, then why are you here?” Loki watched you collapse a little, shrink into yourself. You tried to twist your arm free, and only then did Rogers let you go. The way you lowered your head made Loki uncomfortable. It was like he’d watched you go from someone strong and certain to...something else. You stood there for too long, and even from here Loki could see the way your chest moved with your breaths. You were breathing hard, steadying yourself for something, and Loki could only hope that you were about to yell at Steve as he’d just yelled at you.

“I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re not hurt.” He hadn’t expected those to be the first words that he heard from you, but they were. Your voice was quiet, a little raspy, but rang with a conviction he should have expected. You ducked your head even lower and tried to get around him. Loki caught himself holding his breath, certain that Rogers would try to grab you again, but he didn’t. He let you go. You walked right past Loki on your way out but you even didn’t seem to notice him. 

Neither of you appeared in the common spaces of the Tower for quite some time, but Steve was the first to reappear. Loki saw the way his eyes scanned the room, like he was looking for something, but he made sure to look away before Steve’s eyes could land on him. Loki didn’t know anything about human relationships. He only knew enough to know that he shouldn’t have an opinion on what he’d witnessed, but he found himself on your side. Whatever had happened on that mission, Steve was out of line there in the hangar, and he had to know it. It was stupid of him to demand that you speak and then restrict your access to that notepad. It was _especially_ stupid given his unwillingness to listen to other people who thought his plans wouldn’t work and the sheer number of times that he’d improvised in the field.

Rogers eased back into the swing of things, but your absence continued. Loki tried to focus on other things—on all the things that had occupied his mind before he’d taken notice of you—but he couldn’t help noticing the fact that you only ever ventured out of your room for other missions. Wanda seemed upset, but of course she had nothing to say to Loki about it. He held his tongue through countless meal times, listening to the rest of the team carry on like everything was fine even as your empty chair taunted him. One night, Steve and Bucky were deep in conversation about some foolish thing that Steve had done in their childhoods, and it was too much for him. He stood up to get another plate. He felt the others’ eyes on him as he filled this second plate with food, but honestly he was too busy feeling strange about the fact that he knew what you liked to eat.

He took it to you. Only when he stood there at your door did he actually think about what he was doing. He hesitated for only a moment before knocking. This was probably pointless. He imagined the look on your face, the awkward discomfort before you forced yourself to accept the plate from him. It was almost enough to make him turn around and leave, but then your door cracked open and your face peered out. 

“Loki!” Your voice was nearly as soft as it’d been in the hangar. He thrust the plate forward and tried to force away the memory of how you’d looked the last time he’d heard you speak. You did, at least, accept the plate without any strange looks, but then you drew in a deep breath, like you were bracing for something awful. But, once again, you were just bracing to speak. “Thank you. That’s so kind of you...”

“You don’t have to speak with me,” he said in a rush of words. He ran his fingers through his hair and forced himself not to turn and run. What was this nervousness? You were just a mortal, just a Midgardian standing there in front of him. “You can write. Or...gesture. Or nothing. I heard what he said. You’ve got nothing to prove to me.”

He didn’t have to be an expert on Midgardians to recognize the relief and gratitude that immediately softened your face. He watched you draw you lower lip in between your teeth even as you tried to will away the tears that had sprung into your eyes. It would have been kind to look away, but he couldn’t do it. No one had ever looked at him the way you just did. After some time, you straightened your shoulders again, and took a few steps backwards into your room. You held the door open and tilted your head curiously at him. The implication was clear. You were inviting him in. Maybe he was alarmed by how badly he wanted to join you. Rather than taking the time to analyze that, though, he simply joined you.

He perched on the edge of your bed with you and, for a while, just sort of watched you eat. If you were uncomfortable with that, you gave no sign of it. For the first time in a long time, possibly _ever_ , there were hundreds of thoughts whirling through his mind but he wasn’t sure what to say. He felt like he needed to assure you that Rogers did not speak for the entire team. He wanted to tell you that, whatever you’d done, he—Loki—probably would have done the same thing. He wanted to tell you that Wanda missed you. And then you looked up at him and his mind went quiet. 

Had he ever been close enough to you to see just how brilliant your eyes were? Of course they were beautiful, but even beyond that: your intelligence shone through as clear as day. It was easy, he caught himself thinking, to get lost in eyes like yours. You smiled softly at him, and then leaned over to rummage through the top drawer of your nightstand. Soon enough, you found what you were looking for: a notepad and a pen. He watched, entirely too transfixed, as you began to write.

‘Thank you,’ you wrote, and then went back to double-underline it. Then you glanced up again, as if making sure he’d read it. Of course he had. ‘I haven’t had the courage to show my face in a while.’

Anger surged within him again. Who was Steve Rogers, to make you feel like a prisoner in your own home? “ _He’s_ had no difficulty,” he muttered. “No one seems angry, if that’s what you’re afraid of.” For the first time, he wondered what the rest of the team would have said if they’d witnessed the same outburst that he—Loki--had witnessed. Would they have interrupted sooner? Would they have told Rogers that he was being an ass? For that matter, what would they say now, if Loki were to reveal what he’d seen? It was tempting. This felt too egregious to go unnoticed.

You shrugged. ‘I did what needed to be done. I KNOW Steve’s done the exact same thing as me in the past. It was dumb, what I did, but I think it was also dumb for him to get so angry.’

“I agree.” He shook his head and kept his eyes fixed on your notepad. You had a rather distinctive way of writing: each letter carefully and even elegantly shaped as your pen flew across the page. “I thought I was going to have to step in to make him stop. Can you imagine? Me? A peacemaker?”

You laughed, then, sweet and musical, and maybe Loki could feel a flush creeping across his face at the fact that he’d been the one to make you laugh like that. But you looked away, thank goodness, and turned your attention back to your paper.

‘My hero,’ you wrote, and then added a little heart-shaped flourish. He could feel his heartbeat stutter in his chest. You stole a glance at his face, but then looked away again all too quickly. Could you see what he was feeling? Surely not. Right? You went back to writing: ‘Thank you. For having my back. I really appreciate it.’ And then you drew a circle around the word ‘really’. 

He liked talking to you.

The thought rose, unbidden, to mind, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. So he filed it away, for now, and did his best to change the subject to something more cheerful. The two of you talked long into the night like that, about light topics and heavy topics and everything in between. The sight of your fingers curled around the pen as you formed your words, it transfixed him every time. And the words made him laugh. You were witty. Bold. Sarcastic. 

Lovely.

He did his best not to let you get the better of him. He brought his A-game, as it were, and swallowed down that pride, that strange joy, that he felt when you gasped out his name or grabbed his arm. He made you laugh. A lot. And each time he did, that same heat rose into his cheeks. Because he liked making you laugh, too.


End file.
